A couple weeks ago I had caught wind of some web benchmark being killed. The first thing I did was check Octane, but the test harness was still unchanged.

Yesterday Google announced that Octane has been retired. It claims the deprecation is due to Octane being over-optimized against for years, sometimes to the detriment of real world application performance. You can still run the benchmark, but the page notes that it is no longer being maintained.

This looks really bad. Octane was far from the worst benchmark, and it had been optimized against for years by pretty much everyone anyway. It did not suddenly become outdated overnight. (This does not in any way mean that benchmarks are somehow useless or unnecessary.)